T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem, The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” While I was in politics, I measured out my life in coffee mornings. As my spiritual life began to take off, I measured it out in prayer notebooks. Keeping a prayer notebook, or diary, is a chore at the time but a joy afterward. It is also a great strengthener of faith to turn back the pages years later and to see how many of one’s prayer requests have been answered, although not necessarily in the way or time-scale originally asked for. However, at the time when the notebook is being written, one immediate blessing is the noting down of appropriate Bible passages as well as prayers by authors ranging from first-century saints to twenty-first-century evangelists. The paths trodden by such masters of prayer are well worth following, and I hope I have reaped from them a rich harvest of what Shakespeare called “other men’s flowers” when compiling the various sections of this book.

For all its strengths, the Adoration-Confession-Thanksgiving-Supplication formula has its omissions and weaknesses. Perhaps the most glaring omissions are prayers of contemplation. As these usually take place in silence, it would be difficult to devote many pages to them in a book of this kind. However, as I mention in relation to the Three Crucial Questions prayer on page 132, some of my own deepest moments of discovery have come from going down the contemplative path. In particular the nine-day silent retreat I did on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises under Father Gerard Hughes’s direction in 1998 was another major turning point on my journey.

Prayer needs to be balanced between the inward swing of contemplation and the outward swing of action. In this context action can include doing, serving, or praying in accordance with God’s will. For me, at that time action meant preparing to go to prison since I had already confirmed my intention to plead guilty to charges of perjury arising out of the Guardian libel action. So my most frequent prayer request was, “Lord, help me survive in prison.” It turned out to be a prayer well answered.

On the first morning of my prison sentence, June 9, 1999, I awoke at 5:30 a.m. and wondered how I would survive the coming day. HMP Belmarsh was notorious for being “a tough nick,” and it had lived up to its reputation on the night of my arrival with dozens of its inmates participating in an obscene chant on the theme of “Let’s Get Aitken Tomorrow.” Among the noisiest vocalists in the chant were the neighbors on my wing landing. Occupying the cells immediately to the left and right of me were a couple of prisoners who seemed to have cast themselves in the role of cantors. After helpfully identifying my precise location in their sing-song voices, they would shout a question such as “What shall we do to Aitken (or Aitken’s private parts) tomorrow?” From the other three sides of the exercise yard came a thunder of unprintable responses.